The Problem With L33T Geeks

It’s something you’ll run into sooner or later. “What?! You’re too easy! You’re not Linux. You’re killing the command line!” Yup. The l33tists out there have a problem and it needs to be addressed soon. Now am I saying this as someone who only wants a GUI and no command line whatsoever? Of course not. I use the terminal occasionally, and find it more flexible and nifty than the DOS command prompt in Windows. I don’t need to use it everyday though, especially if all I want to do is burn a frickin’ CD. That’s sort of how the business mind set is too.

They want to get their work done. That’s all. Time is money, and they don’t want to waste either on learning what the grep command does to a file, the complexities of fsck, or the inner workings of the cat command. They want to type memos. They want to write letters and reports. They want to keep track of their budget. They simply want to make running their business easier.

That’s why I get very irritated when “Joe Sixpack” and “Sally Soccermom” are essentially told that they are too stupid to learn FOSS, and that they should stick to Winbloze. While we’re on the subject, there are fanatics of Apple who are slamming Steve Ballmer (though snorting something might explain why he acts so…… strange….), but they forget one thing. Who has money invested in Apple? Oh, I’m sorry: Microsoft! I digress though.

All throughout the various IT fields, computer industries, etc, I have seen the biggest problem: elitism, or as I like the new label, l33tism. You see, people who think that if you only want a graphical interface makes you a dufus fall into this category. They don’t want you to be able to use the alternatives to Microsoft software, because then they’d no longer feel superior. That’s right. I said it. They don’t want to share folks. They pretend they do, but only with other l33ts. You see, Bill Gosper of MIT Tech Square fame actually came to the realization that this was a dangerous thing after watching a rocket head out to space. He realized that the hackers on the ninth floor of that building back in Boston were limiting themselves and were not truly sharing. Richard Stallman didn’t begin to understand until the AI lab started to be locked down with passwords, “security,” and bureaucracy.

I’m an intermediate user of systems that run off the Linux kernel. Of course, I say Linux-based systems because they use the Linux kernel. The makers of a distributed operating system should be able to call said system whatever they so choose. The GPL even gives them that right.

So with that in mind, I want to say to everyone: Why not simply answer the question instead of responding RTFM? Why not treat all questions as valuable questions as a person asking a simple question may actually be new and find the manuals and other digital/print to be unintuitive? We need to understand that not so long ago, we were all beginners.